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Almost every press release from every astronomer could be replaced with wither the word "bullsh1t" or the word "wolf".

We're developers. How often do we roll our eyes when something happens in this field and we hear reporters completely fail to accurately describe what's going on because they don't understand what was explained to them and they mess up their dumbing down for the masses?

The same thing is going on in astrophysics. Don't blame them for the bullshit, blame the reporters.

Well, while there is always a certain amount of 'manipulation' required to turn non-visual data into a picture, it's hardly photo-shopped. As to the exo-planets thing, I've never heard a single instance of anything remotely like that being said by any reputable scientist.

And, it has to be said, that modern digital cameras are no different. They capture energy levels as numbers and those are only turned into pictures by your computer assigning colors to those numbers. If some of that energy is outside of the visual spectrum by the time it gets here, that doesn't make it invalid to assign colors to those numbers based on known attributes of energies of particular levels.

Dark energy of course is theoretical still, and it might get dumped in the long run. But you have to have working hypotheses to move forward on and test, even if they have to be ultimately discarded or modified. The press almost always makes them out to be far more proven than the scientists ever actually claim. The actual papers may be full of qualifications and self-doubts and error bars, but that never gets into any 10 second new show 'science' segment.

Well, while there is always a certain amount of 'manipulation' required to turn non-visual data into a picture, it's hardly photo-shopped.

Really?

They decided that they wanted black holes to have a black middle and a bright ring (which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; they would be the brightest objects in the sky), so they used a taxpayer-paid-for hyper-expensive version of photoshop to take away away everything that didn't look like that (about two thirds of the six million photons that had to work with), and called it absolute proof that their (ridiculous) idea of what a black hole looks like is indisputably true.

Dean Roddey wrote:

As to the exo-planets thing, I've never heard a single instance of anything remotely like that being said by any reputable scientist.

Black holes have a planar accretion disc. It's not a globe around it, it's a flat disc around it, which would be aligned parallel to the black hole's rotation axis. We are seeing it about half inclined to our line of site, so it would look like a bright ring around a black center. Particularly for one so enormous, the event horizon is very large. If it were really small, then yeh, we probably wouldn't see much of a black center because it would be overwhelmed by the light of the accretion disk. But when the event horizon is more like solar system sized, that wouldn't be the case.

That's incorrect. The black holes being discussed here are at the center of galaxies. There is always material falling into these black holes. It's just a matter of how much, which changes over time. In the case of M87 it's VERY active, so there's lot of dust and other material falling into it, so it will have a very bright accretion disk.

The material in that disc isn't 'colliding' it's spiraling in, getting faster and faster as it gets closer to the horizon, which generates immense amounts of energy. Once it hits the horizon of course we don't see anything else from it. But, until then, it's enormously energetic, with the material reaching speeds of a substantial percentage of the speed of light.

That spiraling in creates a planar accretion disk which absolutely does matter as to the orientation relative to the observer. It also controls the direction of jets ejected from the black hole, which are perpendicular to the disc when they occur. M87 has enormous jets spewing out through the galazy from the black hole. And, if you look at the direction of the jets, it would agree very well with image in terms of orientation of the disc.

So, anyhoo, your understanding of the physics involved is just not right.

So, anyhoo, your understanding of the physics involved is just not right.

That's exactly what I was going to say to you.

I suggest you think a bit more carefully about what the immediate region surrounding a black hole would look like, rather than just believing the "absolute truths" that astronomers would have you believe.

What exactly would that be? I think you misunderstand the distinction between a black hole and the singularity inside it. What we call a black hole is just the area inside the event horizon. No, there's not really 'stuff' inside that event horizon, but that makes no difference for what we are talking about here. The gravitational influence of the black hole DOES extend beyond the event horizon. Gravity is neither energy nor mass, so it isn't stopped at the horizon. It extends outwards just as the earthy's gravity extends beyond its surface.

Material falling into the center of the galaxy will be pulled into an accretion disc around the horizon, just as it would if it were falling onto a planet's surface.

You know that just making vague statements doesn't make you right? You claim they are idiots but you provide absolutely no justification or counter argument. If you think I'm wrong, say why. Otherwise you are just wasting everyone's time.

If you are saying that material doesn't fall into the center of galaxies, that's an utter lack of understanding of the dynamics of galaxies. They are chaotic, though immensely slow about it by our standards. There are interactions between bodies all the time. Some gain from those interactions and some lose. Those who lose will fall to lower orbits because they are going slower. Over time this happens enormous numbers of times and material cycles down into the center.

Of course the other big way it happens is from collisions. All larger galaxies have lots of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters in orbits around them. Those often pass through the plane of the galaxy. Every time they do they tend to get pulled apart more and more and that material can fall into the center of the galaxy.

In super-massive elliptical galaxies like M87, it has almost certainly gobbled up not just small galaxies but other fairly large ones over time. That process provides enormous amounts of material for the central black hole, over long periods of time (by our standards anyway.)

Please tell me you do not believe in the Flat Earth nonsense going 'round.

Well, I'm careful whenever I go to the end of the b;lock to make sure I don't fall off and I wondered how I stuck to the earth when I was in the southern hemisphere. I've even been to the equator and didn't see any curving of the sidewalk.

The thing is that for the last five decades I've watched these people come up with bright idea after bright idea, and great discovery after great discovery, every time declaring that everything they say is the absolute truth, and almost every time backing away from the idea later -- after real scientists (i.e. Physicists, not stargazing speculators and con-men seeking acclaim and grants) have proven them wrong.

Exoplanets and photos of black holes are only the latest in a long, long series of claims.

Scientists NEVER say they have the absolute truth, at least not any real ones. You get your facts from popular media which always overplays these things, always. The reason that science is so powerful and basically has given you pretty much everything you have is BECAUSE it doesn't consider anything absolute. It only has degrees of certainty and error bars. Unlike dogmatic systems, there's nothing in the world a young scientist would want to do more than overthrow some long standing theory.

Though of course these days they are never actually overthrown, not the ones that have been well tested. Long years of hard core tests that pass prove that a theory has predictive power. But, it may only have that power within a particular set of conditions that we can currently test. Go beyond that, and you may need something more. But that something more isn't going to suddenly make all those measurements invalid. That theory will just subsume the old one.

For instance, Einstein didn't invalidate Newtonian physics. The vast majority of the world and even space travel still uses Newtonian physics and it works perfectly well. What changed was the mental model of what causes gravity, and that new model works at speeds and gravities that Newtonian physics doesn't.

At some point, there may be a new theory that subsumes general relativity, but it won't make relativity invalid, it will just provide a new mental model that deals with an even broader realm of conditions. But no one can assume it is the ultimate one.

One thing that confuses many people who don't get science is that science has two big branches. One is figure out the ultimate roots of reality type stuff, and the other is get stuff done. The latter (and bigger) branch only requires that the model work very accurately, not that it represent the ultimate explanation of reality. Theories are validated based on how accurately they predict what will happen for the most part, not based on more metaphysical concerns.

The folks who are trying to figure out the ultimate roots of reality are not in the same sort of business. They can't really test their theories in many cases, which means it's not science in the strictest sense. And they can't run tests, they can only examine the one universe we have. It's a very tough row to hoe, since they don't have many of the tools that would normally be available to scientists.